Tag Archives: oregon beer news

Over the past couple years, I've welcomed a number of national and foreign beer dignitaries who've made the trek to far Portland. Rarely do they visit long enough to sample from the full range of good breweries we have in Portland (nevermind Oregon). So of course they want to see our best. But best is a funny thing. Two stops on just about ever ...

@Beervana Dude you cleaned up! Two golds, one bronze, and one "participant" — Bill Night (@itspubnight) October 7, 2016 This morning, the North American Guild of Beer Writers announced their annual writing awards, and they sent some sugar my way. Over the past half-decade or so that they've been doing this ("we" actually ...

Harsh. It's hard out there for a pumpkin ale. The pumpkin beer category went through stable sales and volume growth beginning in 2005, spiking in 2013, but since 2014 has dipped to an all-time low in 2015, dropping 10% in sales and 13% in total volume. As a consequence: What has been dramatically dubbed “The Great ...

Ben Dobler Last week I was invited to the debut of the newest brewery in that one-mile chunk of Southeast Portland that was once charmingly called the "Beermuda Triangle" because it had three (!) breweries. (It now has ten.) I'd put this patch of land up against all comers in terms of most-beery (it also has two pubs wi ...

I just happened to notice that my cider book is now selling for a massive discount on Amazon--just $2.79! I know that this is a passion for a relative few of you out there, but even if it's something you haven't yet delved into much, I encourage you to give the book a look. I wrote it in a narrative format, with the hope of drawing the reader i ...

Continuing with the discussion of fresh hops, and delving into the archives again, here are excerpts from a connected pair of posts from 2013. I'm reposting them because there continues to exist a kind of fresh-hop fundamentalism in which the only "authentic" fresh hop beers are the ones made exclusively with fresh hops. There's a rea ...

 Mt Tabor Brewing held a media event unveiling their new, inner-Southeast location, and as things began dissipating, a dispute broke out about fresh hop beers. I thought I'd settled all this already, but I see there's still work to do. As such, I'm reposting comments from September 24, 2014--"You Know a Fresh Hop Beer By Its Taste." ...

“It depends on the beer category you are producing.  If you try the lager type, the decoction is very important.  We compared decoction versus infusion on our  small-scale brewery; always the beer brewed by the infusion process was emptier in its taste—the body was not correct for the lagers.  Also the color changed.  If you boil durin ...

My sojourn to South Dakota has not given me too many insights into the nature of the national beer scene. The state is in a nascent phase of building a market for local beer; to date there are only 14 craft breweries, and most of them are tiny (one that I know of, Gandy Dancer, is so small and provisional one could debate whether it actually ex ...

One of the many statues in Sioux Falls, SD I am currently sitting in a slightly dated hotel room on the edge of Brookings, South Dakota. The South Dakota Festival of Books is the event, and I'm doing my bit to act as a beery interloper on all the high-minded literary salons that will be soon taking place. I was pair ...